Here’s a TappedOut link to a Magic deck that I made for the Shadows Over Innistrad Game Day. It’s called “Butt Company“, and it’s a fun little brew that I came up with when I decided that I didn’t want to buy very many cards (I’m not much of a Standard player).

It takes advantage of Assault Formation, a card that allows creatures you control to assign combat damage based on their toughness, and the various number of high defense creatures with evasion that you can grab at the end of your opponent’s turn with Collected Company.

I made quite a few mistakes playing the deck, the first of which was assuming that I was supposed to be playing it as a linear aggressive deck. I often just plopped my creatures down and dropped Assault Formation pre-combat so that my swings could be massive. However, the high amount of single-target removal in Standard right now meant that my opponent could just destroy my creatures one-by-one and prevent me from establishing that board presence that (I thought) would allow me to win the game.

After losing a bit in the tournament, I started playing the deck like I would a combo deck. I would play multiple creatures a turn, wait for my opponent to empty their hand of single-creature removal, and then Collected Company at the end of their turn. Often that CoCo would hit two evasive creatures that could swing into them for 8 damage in a single turn unopposed. I wish that I had played the deck this way from the beginning, but you learn what you learn.

In any case, it’s a very fun deck to play, and it is competitive against quite few decks in the format simply because playing it as a combo deck and siding in Negates allows you to be very controlling. A good time!

Also, it is called “Butt Company” because one of the bigger decks in this Standard is “Bant Company” (which is now shifting to Four-Color Bant). I just wanted this here for all the future Magic historians to have perfect clarity on what this weird deck was all about.